Eutopia: A Novel of Terrible Optimism

Once or twice—for an instant each time—he obeyed, glancing down the platform, under the overhang where all the passengers gathered against the cold spring rain, to be-spy her sitting on the bench next to her chaperone, reading from a book in her lap. She would stir, he imagined, feeling the heat of his look even though she didn’t look up to meet it—just smiling a little more each time.

Later, Jason would learn that he was off the mark but not entirely. For while it was true that his gaze drew notice, it was not from Ruth Harper, but Miss Louise Butler, who sat near to her friend but beyond the scope of Jason’s attention. At only his second glance, she whispered to Ruth:

“We have an admirer.”

“Do we?”

Miss Butler’s hands remained folded in her lap, but she nonetheless motioned in Jason’s direction, with progressively indelicate thrusts of her right forefinger. In spite of this, Ruth did not look up from her book. She did, however, smile a little.

“Is it one of those filthy loggers?”

“He might be. How does one tell a filthy logger from a smooth-faced young man who obviously does not know how to dress himself?”

Ruth sighed. “Is he looking now?” she asked, and when Miss Butler said he wasn’t, Ruth spared her a sidelong stare of withering significance. “Well?”

“There.” Miss Butler pointed.

“Oh,” she said, glancing quickly and then returning her eyes to her book. Her smile was noticeably wider this time than the last.

“Him.”

§

The train to Bonner’s Ferry was not so luxurious as the one from Helena. It was mostly hauling freight, and the single passenger car was old and cheap, with hard wooden benches instead of cushioned seats, and boot-worn slats on the floor in place of the deep red carpeting of the Pullman cars of the Pacific Northwest.

The passengers seemed generally suited to the humbler appointments. They were almost all men—unshaven, uncouth and probably unbathed fellows of the sort that Jason would watch close if he encountered them with his mama at his side. More than one of them sent leering glances in the direction of Misses Harper and Butler, who this time did not have the luxury of their own car. The men’s obvious intentions vexed Jason.

Let them try something, he said to himself. As the train wound through the hills, he found his thoughts drifting back to those nights he spent guarding his mama, wondering about wolves and ammunition and such things as followed from those.

“You figure these fellows have numbers?” he asked an hour or so in.

“Numbers?” Aunt Germaine blinked. “Oh. ERO numbers. It is possible, but unlikely. We have not been at this long enough yet. If any of them had been in prison, or hospitalized…”

“I bet a few of them have been in prison,” said Jason, and Aunt Germaine chuckled into her handkerchief.

“No doubt,” she said. “But please keep your voice down, Nephew. If you are correct, we don’t wish to provoke an incident.”

Jason sat quiet and tried as best he might to look beyond the window. The land here was not dissimilar to that around his mama’s old homestead: low foothills covered thick in pine trees, little tongues of lakes with rocky beaches, but mostly—trees.

For parts of the trip, those trees would draw in on the train, so all you could see going past was greenery and the shadows beyond. Then they would open up, and the green would spread out forever, crawling up the sides of far mountains strange to Jason’s eye. Jason understood Bonner’s Ferry to be a mill town like Eliada, only one that had been there longer. He figured towns like that would do well up here for a long time, all those trees they had to chew on.

“Is there a prison up in Eliada?” he asked.

“No,” said Aunt Germaine. “They don’t have a great many prisons up this way, I shouldn’t think. What’s in Eliada is perhaps even less common.”

“Well, Aunt?” said Jason, after a long moment watching her stare out the window, not telling him what was less common. “Are you going to tell me what?”

She smiled. “Here comes the town,” she said, as the train whistle hooted. The view out the window went dark then as the wind blew the smoke from the engine down and they started a slow turn. “Get ready for a boat ride, Nephew.”

Jason found that he liked Bonner’s Ferry, and he was disappointed it was only a way station. It smelled like sap and sawdust and wood smoke, and was dominated by a towering sawmill on a river that was all but covered in floating tree trunks. It was raining quite hard under a rolling dark sky as they got off the train, but that didn’t stop the men in this town from going about the hard business of logging and lumber-milling. There was an air of industry here, unlike any he’d seen in Helena or Sand Point—or especially, in those days when its inhabitants still drew breath, Cracked Wheel. Perhaps, he thought, Eliada will be the same as Bonner’s Ferry.

“Where do we go?”

Germaine pointed. “With that fellow.”